Writing the Journey: June 1999

"Teaching Travel Writing - A Journey Through the Senses"

Teaching people how to write travel narratives and keep useful travel journals is really about introducing people to their senses -- to see, hear, smell, taste and touch. Intuition also obtains. It's about encouraging writers to report sensations straight up, not filtered through interpretation.

Vivid travel writing propels the reader through the sensual experience of place and people that the writer holds in memory and notebook. The writer has to notice fully and report information in a way that brings the reader into the unfolding events, selecting narrative elements that draw an accurate portrait of the place, its mood and people.

Think of travel writing by Samuel Clemens, Norman Lewis, Tobias Schneebaum, Freya Stark, Patrick Leigh Fermor, D. H. Lawrence, Lawrence Durrell, Rebecca West. They gracefully report the passage of the journey, the people, the effect of place on the traveler, how the place exists despite the traveler.

I teach writers to marshal their senses when they set pen to travel notebook. Write as if you are blind, I say. Push your other senses. For those creating narrative from memory, I offer visualization exercises where the writer takes a specific point of view and writes from memory concrete sensual details. Verb driven writing exercises point out the feebleness of verbs that describe condition or attitude and the potency of action and sound verbs.

The travel diary is the vehicle for conveying nuance of place in time. The daily notebook is perhaps the most reliable source for capturing the passing scene in a travel narrative. Photographs and sketches are useful too. Diary entries written in the moment capture encounters, altercations, fragment of conversation. These transcendent moments bring the reader into the landscape.

To infuse literary merit in travel writing, the diarist/writer roots the experiences in wider context--acknowledging history, culture and earlier narratives of place. Engaging writers sustain awareness of their own role as the traveler moving through the landscape, allowing the reader to fantasize the journey. The story line uses the momentum of the journey in time, though rarely in chronology. A travel writer with designs on creating literature cultivates a voice aware of the mythic heroic role of the traveler without sinking into ego-focused memoir.

I encourage writers to demonstrate intimacy with their material through the telling of anecdotes, scraps of dialogue, personal memory flashes that arise during the journey. I suggest they cultivate broad understanding of the place and its meaning. I ask them to embrace risk and place themselves squarely in the narrative while acknowledging in the narrative that the place exists in time and space completely apart from the traveler's passage. Perhaps employing this sensitive perspective will ensure that more travel writers are aware of the impact of travel writing on a particular place.

These techniques and others may improve travel journalism, but will literature emerge? Perhaps in due time, if writers are diligent in pursuing their unique narratives and write in sense-based verb-driven prose while feeding their minds superior writing, (which might not always be other travel narratives), more of what is called travel writing will be known as travel literature.

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Updated May 23, 1999